Miller's employer shut down those VMs at the end of the working day to free up resources for overnight jobs. He therefore wrote a cleanup routine that removed the drives and backed up their contents. This story took place in 1981, a time when it was possible for code written by a 21-year-old to go into production without much scrutiny.
“People wanted to see more pro-code flexibility,” he said in an interview at Sapphire 2026. “We had gone with a low-code approach. You could give it extension points and tools, but you couldn't touch the core of it. Now you can build a custom agent, connect it to your own GitHub.”
I worked at a startup at the time, our team used this ancient bug tracker. May have been Bugzilla. The point being that tool was not particularly configurable. You either got notifications or you did not get notifications. If you configure for notifications, you got notifications. You touch a bug, you get an email. Somebody touches a bug, they get an email. Somebody else touches a bug, you get 10 emails. Get the idea. The team decided, this is not tenable. We need a concise daily report that shows you the life of our bugs for the day.
“Aided by the efforts of the Reproducible Builds project, we've decided it's time to say that Debian must ship reproducible packages,” wrote ReleaseTeam member Paul Gevers. “Since yesterday, we have enabled our migration software to block migration of new packages that can't be reproduced or existing packages (in testing) that regress in reproducibility.”
gtk2-ng is reviving and modernizing Gtk2 version 2, which the GNOME developers declared dead back in 2020. We held off on reporting this for a while to see if the idea would gain some support, and it does seem to winning interest and followers. Reviving a 24-year-old toolkit that reached its official end-of-life six years ago is a retrospective sort of undertaking, and as such, it appeals to some modern-but-nostalgic development projects.
"Terminal emulators are a big part of our daily lives as developers but yet we are not making enough innovations in that space," Parmaksiz told The Register in an email. "With Ratty I hope to inspire others to experiment with terminals and push the limits of what they can do."
The command line is still the best tool for some jobs—many jobs, in fact. A mouse-driven point-and-click interface essentially reduces the user to pointing at something on the screen and grunting, 'DO! DO THAT!' at the computer.
